[nl]

I was like you for a long time, until two things happened:

1) I met someone who is running a site that took him a few hours to build, cents to run (AppEngine) (plus $20 for two domain names) and makes over $1000/month (yeah, so he's spent more time since then, but not much.)

2) I build a site that cost me $15 to build ($10 domain hosting, $5 - refundable - to join an affiliate program), hours to build (it's basically a blog on Wordpress) and makes me nearly $200/month.

I can't say I'm an expert, but one way to duplicate this is to find a vertical problem domain with a lot of interest (ie, busy forums), find some problem they have (often it's some kind of calculation that people always have trouble with) and build a crappy, ugly tool to do it for them. Make the calculation URL addressable, then put a short note in a forum saying what you've done and follow up by using it in a few discussions.

[palish]

But what part actually earns you money?

[3pt14159]

I've had best responses with Amazon's affiliate program. Made about $130 bucks from something like 5 or 6 blog posts. Hourly rate worth it? Nope. Was it fun? Yep. Basically what I've learned is that Google's dynamic ad placement is the last thing you should try. Putting in an ad (or affiliate link, there are even services that will auto do this with Javascript, so you're users wont see and you don't have to be part of a billion referral programs. Gray hat? Maybe.) that actually targets what you are talking about is so much more effective.

[nl]

I've written a context sensitive affiliate adserver that serves relevant ads via Javascript. That works reasonably well, but I do need to optimize the ads themselves some.

[3pt14159]

That is really cool. Have you open sourced it? It's JavaScript in the first place so I know anyone can see it in your site, but it would be cool to track it on Github.

[nl]

No, it's not open source.

Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.

[nl]

On that site I make $100-$180 month from affiliate sales, $5-$10 from AdSense.

If you are dealing with physical products then affiliate programs can work quite well.

Edit: On my friend's site is is all AdSense. His is non-physical product related.

[maheshs]

URLs please